Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste

Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Science Foundation is running a story on how corncob waste can be used to created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas. These methane storage systems may encourage mass-market natural gas cars. In fact, these 'briquettes are the first technology to meet the 180 to 1 storage to volume target set by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000.' They can lead to flat and compact tanks and have already been installed in a pickup truck used regularly by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality. And as the whole natural gas infrastructure exists already, this new technology could be soon adopted by car manufacturers."

Re:Supply?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Fossil fuel natural gas is also a finite source. But dont forget America alone has 100 million cows and about 120 million pigs. Cant guess how many million chicken. All their waste produced methane. Currently their wastes are a mixture of methane, nutrient rich fertilizer and small amounts of extremely stinky gases mainly H2S.

If these can be seperated you get so many benefits. Pollution/odour abatement, organic fertilizer, auto fuel, green house gas emission reduction, etc etc. Last time I actually did the calculation I came up with six cows can keep one car running. With a million cow, we are talking about 15% reduction in oil consumption. Since we import 50% of the oil, this would represent 30% reduction in oil imports. Add the pigs and chicken, we can run our cars on their shit instead of importing oil from the middle east. On national security standpoint alone, we should be investing very heavily on recovering fuel from farm waste.

Re:Scary

[Aqua_boy17]

It's already being done. Been to Disney lately? Their trams and many other vehicles arlready run on natural gas. Same with the National Park Service in some areas. You probably have an LP tank sitting there under your back yard BBQ grill. When was the last time you heard of one of these blowing up? The problem with this is not the nature of the fuel, but in how you store it. Pretty strict regulations are in place in the US that regulate the manufacutre and limit the life of LP tanks (I think it's 12 years). I can't recall ever hearing of one of these accidentally exploding. Granted, adding it to a fast moving (highway speed) vehicle increases the danger but it's already in use in a lot of slower moving vehicles.